Meghavarshini Krishnaswamy

PhD Student
TestPerson
mkrishnaswamy@email.arizona.edu

About Meghavarshini Krishnaswamy

Hello! I'm Megh (she/her) a speech enthusiast, specializing in acoustic phonetics. I worked on speech entrainment and phonetic accommodation, L2 speech acquisition, pitch perception and its effects on phonemic identification, and the acoustics of complex tongue gestures. I have also worked on the sound systems of Indic languages like Malayalam, Bangla, Hindi, and Assamese. I enjoy learning about internet linguistcs, encountering Englishes of the world; and composing short, fun language questionaires for my friends on social media!

I have two current research focii. The first is the analysis of phonemic contrast in languages with large phonemic inventories, especially among plosives, to understand how languages systems maintain, store and access tight phonemic contrasts. I also look at the role of secondary acoustic cues and phenomena like neighbourhood density in these processes. The second focus is the modelling of speech entrainment and phonetic accomodation, to find a relationship between convergence in speech patterns and cooperative relationships among speakers.

I am currently employed as a Graduate Research Assistant in the ASIST-ToMCAT project’s Speech and NLP team, where I  have collaborated on projects related to multimodal modelling of human behaviour, assessment of the performance of ASR transcription services, and with the automatic collection of acoustic features for speech analysis. I have also worked as a Research Assistant in the Douglas Phonetics Lab, University of Arizona; and in the Splang Lab, The English and Foreign Languages University (Hyderabad), where I asisted in running experiments, creating auditory stimuli for forced choice and eye-tracking experiments, designing speech production experiments, and with data analysis and modelling.

Areas of Study

  • Speech perception 

  • Speech production

  • Phonology of South Asian Languages

  • Computational linguistics

Research Interests

  • Stop constrasts and the impact of articulatory and perceptual constraints

  • Speech acquisition

  • Phonetic accomodation/ vocal entrainment

Areas of Study

  • Speech perception 

  • Speech production

  • Phonology of South Asian Languages

  • Computational linguistics

Selected Publications

  • Culnan, J., Park, S., Krishnaswamy, M., & Sharp, R. (2021, April). Me, myself, and ire: Effects of automatic transcription quality on emotion, sarcasm, and personality detection. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (pp. 250-256).

  • Krishnaswamy, M., Dutta, I., & Bhaumik, M. (2020). Alveolar stops exhibit greater coarticulatory resistance than retroflexes and dentals in Malayalam. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 148(4), 2582-2582.

  • Dutta, I., Redmon, C., Krishnaswamy, M., Chandran, S., & Raj, N. (2019). [Articulatory complexity and lexical contrast density in models of coronal coarticulation in Malayalam](https://www.chredmon.com/documents/2019_dutta-et-al_articulatory-complex...). In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.

  • Krishnaswamy, M., Dutta, I., & Banerjee, U. (2018, May). Active cavity expansion through lingual adjustments to place of constriction in voiced geminates. In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 175th ASA, Vol. 33, No. 1, p. 060002. Acoustical Society of America.